I have been looking into Windows Azure lately getting ready for the technology and for the talks I am planning on giving in the near future. When I was telling one of my friends (who loves everything Apple and loves to bash Microsoft) about Azure he was laughing about how the “cloud” sounds very abstract and hard to understand. In the end he was equating the “cloud” to vaporware. I hope I set him straight about how the cloud is more like the Internet where he has data on content delivery networks.

Today I read this article about someone who’s credentials were stolen through a phishing scam and his information and community on Orkut were changed by the phishers. He tried to contact Google about the issue but couldn’t find anyone to help him fix the problem. That has had me thinking about what happens when data or applications have problems in the Azure.

Microsoft has been very clear that the current implementation is pre-release and before it becomes a “real product” they will have a SLA in place. I don’t know what that SLA will entail but I suspect it might be something like Hotmail. Right now I am paying a small yearly fee for Hotmail so I can send and receive larger files and I don’t have to worry about my account being disabled due to inactivity. At one time I had a real need for these services and the price is so low that I keep paying it. What really got me hooked on paying was that I could use Outlook to retrieve my e-mail. This is so much faster and more convenient than the web interface since I have Outlook open anyway. I also found that it got me some enhanced support options (which is really more relevant to the purpose of this post). When I was having problems there was a dedicated support alias that I could use and I got a reasonable response from a live person. I haven’t tried the support on a free account but I would suspect that it would be more automated and point me to the FAQ. I can live with this since I really shouldn’t expect Microsoft to pay for bandwidth, storage, and tech support for a free account. I see trading good tech support for free e-mail. It is a risk/reward equation where I either feel I can fix it myself, ask the community for support, or just drop the e-mail account and start a new one.

If the Azure SLA follows the Hotmail model (and I hope it does) there will be different levels of support depending on how much you are willing to pay. As your applications and data in the cloud become more important you will be willing to pay more and expect more from Microsoft like better response times, a knowledgeable human being to help answer questions, and higher levels of redundancy and safety on your applications to avoid problems in the first place. I don’t know if there will be a free service but I hope there is for things like small applications that hardly use any resources. At that level I don’t expect Microsoft to do anything if I tell them I lost data from blob or table storage. If I am paying a modest fee I would expect them to look at the problem and help me recover to some state in time. If I am paying a lot then I would expect “up to the minute” data recovery. I could live with a model where I pay for the protection I want.